Tag Archives: XSL

Welcome session attendees and anyone else who happens to wander on this page. This blog entry is a post session review of resources mentioned and code used in our Bring Sexy Back to SharePoint and Gaining Total Control of Your Sites with Data View Web Parts sessions from April 2014 SPTechCon in San Francisco. Continue reading SPTechCon San Francisco April 2014 Session Review→

This is the second part of a three part series where Heather Solomon and Dustin Miller are exploring the ever-popular “Mega Menu”, and how to create a powerful, styled and functional mega menu for use on your SharePoint sites. After creating the HTML markup and the CSS to meet the functional requirements, it is time to take a look at the importance of taxonomy in navigation and check out the XSLthat will be used for the mega menu. Continue reading Mega Menu for SharePoint – Part 2 of 3→

You won’t be sitting in a SharePoint Experience class for very long before Heather or I open up a code editing app we both love – and for most of you, it’s something you’ve never seen before. Whether it is ASPX, JavaScript, XSL, HTML, PHP or CSS, one of our main go-to applications for web development (and yes this includes SharePoint) is Sublime Text.Continue reading Sublime Text Rocks→

Thanks for attending our sessions!

SPTechCon rocked!

SPTechCon is winding down now in Boston, and we had an awesome experience sharing our knowledge with attendees. Heather and I have created this post with resources for attendees of our sessions (and other curious lurkers). Continue reading SPTechCon 2012 in Boston→

For years, I’ve advised people who have the guts and the skills to ditch Visual Studio and learn more about XSL, CSS and JavaScript (including libraries like jQuery). Maybe I’m a rebel, I don’t know, but I don’t need to write C# to create a kick-ass front end component for SharePoint. So much can be done with the product out of the box, it just takes a creative approach.

Many people know me as the original proponent of the Data View Web Part, first introduced back when WSS v2.0 was released. While SharePoint has come a long way since then, the web developer experience for creating custom views hasn’t. Last week, as I was rehearsing my demonstrations for my SP TechCon session (on, naturally, the Data View Web Part) it occurred to me: This could be easier. Easier to demonstrate. Easier to write. Easier to get excited about. Easier to get the creative juices flowing.

Then, I took the wheel to show how you can get any kind of markup you want from any SharePoint list. Creating a new view of the announcements list (Insert → Data View → Empty Data View), I wiped out the data view and replaced it with my own custom “Baseline DVWP.xsl” file to render the Announcements list with HTML5 markup.

Back At It Again … More CSS Goodness (Tuesday, 4:00 PM)

Based on Heather’s new approach to writing CSS for SharePoint, she showed several samples of writing style statements that simply have a stronger specificity score/weight than what is being applied to a SharePoint component. For example:

a[id$=editPageLink] {
background: red;
}

The above style statement targets the “Edit this Page” link in a SharePoint wiki page by looking for specific text at the end of the anchor’s ID value. There is no need to track down the style statements used by SharePoint and make copies of these long style selectors; that just adds more baggage to your CSS file. Instead use a tool like Firebug in Firefox to identify and build your own selector. Heather showed style statement samples for editing table views, controlling a web part based on location and a quick trick for controlling form inputs based on type.

I was super pumped to do this session. I will blog more about it real soon, but I have come up with a new, and in my view, wildly efficient way to create custom views of your SharePoint data with XSL. While I work feverishly on a detailed post discussing my new “Magic Data View Builder” template, here’s a quick recap:

First, I demonstrated replacing a List View Web Part’s “XSL Link” property with the URL to a copy of the Magic Data View Builder template, which I uploaded to a document library. On refresh, you’re given a starter template for your own custom list view.